J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

Chapter 2:

Coetzee's Freedom

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wanted to have written it—that is to say, wanted to be the person who had successfully brought off the writing of it.

What, then, do I want-to-write? A question to prospect, to open up, perhaps in the present dialogue, but not to mine, to exploit. Too much of the fictional enterprise depends on it. Just as it is not productive to discover the answer to the question of why one desires: the answer threatens the end of desire, the end of the production of desire. (DP 207–208)

Coetzee is clear that he has no argument with those who cleave to the heroic tradition. He has always admired Nadine Gordimer—in 1978, he said, “I read Nadine Gordimer because I think she's extraordinarily accomplished” (Watson 22), although he has reservations about her difficulty in accepting “that stories finally have to tell themselves, that the hand that holds the pen is only the conduit of a signifying process” (DP 341). He told David Attwell that he regarded it “as a badge of honor to have had a book banned in South Africa, and even more of an honor to have been acted against punitively.… This honor I have never achieved nor, to be frank, merited” (DP 298).

Nevertheless, in his most direct contribution to the debate of the 1980s, his 1987 address in Cape Town titled “The Novel Today,” he complains that “in South Africa the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history is proceeding with alarming rapidity” owing to the “intense ideological pressure” of the time (3). He is at pains to point out that storytelling and history are both discourses, neither of which has a monopoly on the representation of reality, and

no matter what it may appear to be doing, the story may not really be playing the game you call Class Conflict or the game called Male Domination or any of the other games in the games handbook. While it may certainly be possible to read the book as playing one of those games, in reading it in that way you may have missed something. You may have missed not just something, you may have missed everything. (4)

There is a connection between the open-mindedness Coetzee is recommending here to readers and the kind of open-minded, nonanalytical